Abstract

RODRIGUEZ ZARATE, María del Mar. The eroded borders of language: the third space and heterology in The Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. Connotas. Rev. crit. teór. lit. [online]. 2023, n.26, pp.368-390.  Epub June 26, 2023. ISSN 2448-6019.  https://doi.org/10.36798/critlit.v0i26.439.

As Amilhat Szary points out, we live with borders beyond those demarcated by the imaginary lines of our cartographies. In this, language is no exception: as a signifying sound, it is capable of consolidating territories and conquering the empty terrain of silence, but without being exempt from its own border walls. This is shown in The Lost Children Archive (2019), in which the discursive library of a family that moves to the Arizona desert crosses the lexicon of migration and border problems with that of separation and the emotional crisis of its members. Thus, between the mother’s archive on migrant children and the father’s on the genocide of Native American peoples, it will be the children who begin to recognize the porosity of the affective lexical borders that surround them, becoming aware of the expansion of the socio-spatial limits in the terrain of the family. Therefore, this critical note aims to explore how the erosion of the boundaries of the intimate and the social in The Lost Children Archive (2019) make language deterritorialize towards the consolidation of a third space (Edward W. Soja), where real, imaginary and discursive geographies are reinterpreted to rethink the complexity of the phenomena that afflict contemporary space (such as the migration and human rights crisis, and discrimination).

Keywords : spatiality; territoriality; border; migration; human geography.

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